Openness fosters innovation, while being closed inhibits innovation. That's the main lesson in Rich Miner's keynote at the Emerging Communications Conference. Miner, manager of Google's Wireless Platforms group, discusses the changing nature of the mobile industry, the constraints currently limiting it, and how Google's Android platform will help open up the industry.
Mobile phones today are about as powerful as PCs were in 2002, so anything we could do then should be possible on a phone now. In reality, there is a large gap between the computing hardware in these phones and their actual capabilities. Some of this is because of the user experience limitations of a small screen and no keyboard, but these problems are being solved by technology and design. The major limitations are in the closed networks and business models predominant today.
Until developers can expect to easily distribute their applications, new development for mobile phones will be limited. Currently, developers must convince carriers there is demand for a program or service, rather than the market determining it. Also, closed implementations (like Java or Windows Mobile) and hardware make it hard to effectively develop for a range of devices. Google's Android project aims to solve that problem with a complete mobile development platform, including operating system, virtual machines, frameworks, dialers, applications and more all in one integrated package. When it is finished, it will all be released as open source, with a permissive license. There is already lots of interest and faith in this project, as the Android SDK has been downloaded more than 750,000 times for a system that isn't currently on any real phones.
Rich Miner has been developing innovative communications and interface-intensive applications for over 20 years and he has occupied a variety of high-profile technology development roles during that time. He is currently Group Manager of Mobile Platforms for Google, helping to build the Android platform. Rich joined Google through the acquisition of Android, a mobile software platforms company he co-founded. Prior to starting Android Rich was Vice President of Advanced Services at Orange, where he headed the group's R&D activities in North America. He came to Orange through acquisition of another company he co-founded, Wildfire, which made a voice-based personal assistant product that was sold to fixed and wireless carriers. Rich held various positions at Wildfire, including CTO and MD for Europe. He met his founding partner at Wildfire when he helped incubate Avid Technology in his university lab. Rich received his doctorate in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, where he was also Co-Director of the Interactive Media Group, leading research projects with such companies as Hewlett-Packard, Apollo, IBM and NYNEX.
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